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4069

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  1. Two arms one above the other would, in British practice, be a junction signal with the top arm reading left and the bottom right. And there are no circumstances, even on the Southern, in which a distant arm would be cleared with the stop arm above it at danger. Failures and momentary aspects excepted, of course 😮

     

    However, I don't think the thing in the advert is a British signal.

  2. 12 hours ago, Jeremy C said:

    Not really a pioneer; they were founded in 1881.

     

    John Saxby was perhaps the earliest of what we would recognise as a signalling engineer, patenting an interlocking mechanism in 1856 while he was working for the LBSCR before setting up his own company in 1861, joined shortly arfter by Farmer. McKenzie and Holland dates from about the same time, so both of these firms predate the Railway Signal Company by about 20 years.

    Although that advert dates from the 1960s, the RSCo had been part of Westinghouse since 1920. It continued to make "traditional" equipment at Fazakerley until closure in 1974. Badge engineering was not just a motor industry practice!

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  3. 4 hours ago, Morello Cherry said:

    Is it me but do Saxby and Farmer share the same office address as McKenzie, Holland? 58 Victoria Street?

    No- S&F were at 53 Victoria Street, and McK&H at 58. However, a company formed in 1901 acquired a controlling interest in both companies, and many others in the UK signalling industry (including W R Sykes) under the name of the Consolidated Signal Co, so they were all part of the same group from then on. Merger with Westinghouse followed in 1907, but various trading names continued in use for many years.

    • Informative/Useful 3
  4. 22 hours ago, John M Upton said:

    And yet London Transport were for some reason allowed to continue taking new buses with white on black plates into the 1980's.  I always wondered how they got away with that exemption, especially as there were just white painted numbers with no reflective ability at all.

     

    Maybe the theory was that if you couldn't see something fourteen feet high and bright red, a little thing like a reflective numberplate wasn't going to make much difference 😮

    • Funny 5
  5. 4 hours ago, Hroth said:

    The "astonishing" headline is something thought up by a sub-editor who thinks of all model locomotives as toys

     

    How do you know that? "Astonishing" is a quotation from the auctioneers.

     

    4 hours ago, Hibelroad said:

    of course the journalists just think it's a funny story about people buying toy trains. 

    I didn't get that impression at all. Why this violent reaction to what appears to be a serious piece? It's nice to see decent  prices paid for high-quality models, given modellers' normal reluctance to pay the going rate for skilled workmanship.

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  6. 3 hours ago, D9020 Nimbus said:

    Before the 1980s there were only two accidents that were not carried out by HMRI: Tay Bridge and the 1968 Hixon level crossing accident. In both cases this was because HMRI had inspected and approved the arrangements and were not therefore sufficiently independent. Kings Cross was not really a railway accident as such. 

     

    The trend toward judge-led public inquiries began with Clapham and continued for quite some time. This change was not welcomed by BR; its safety director Stanley Hall in particular. He did write a book on railway accidents called Hidden Dangers. Part of the reason was that at some point a change in legislation prevented an HMRI inspector holding a public inquiry, as they had done in the past, though I believe this was after Clapham. HMRI inspectors had held public inquiries, but unlike the judge-led kind there were no lawyers present. (They also held private inquiries, too.)

    Oh dear. There's a lot of mythology there.

     

    The Regulation of Railways Act 1871 gave the Board of  Trade power to appoint inspectors to inquire into accidents (previously they had relied on force of personality alone), and also the opportunity to appoint additional persons "with legal or specialist knowledge" to assist an inspector in their investigation, and in such cases the appointed group was known as a court of inquiry. The power was first made use of for the investigation into the Wigan derailment of 1873, and was used on a handful of further occasions in the 1870s. It fell out of favour, probably because it was cumbersome and added little to the quality of the investigations carried by Inspecting Officers alone, and the Tay Bridge inquiry was the last time it was used in the Victorian era. In that case the additional expertise employed was in civil engineering, and not law.

     

    The Court of Inquiry process was revived for the Hixon investigation because of the high level of public concern about automatic level crossings, which were seen as a foreign-inspired novelty which had been endorsed by the RI (which did not become HMRI until 1990), and the multi-agency failings which the accident had shown up, involving the police and the  Ministry of Transport as well as the railway itself.

     

    The use of the procedure at Clapham and subsequently reflected the growing realisation that there was a conflict of interest between the  role of the RI as safety regulator and investigator. Stanley Hall was not BR's safety director: he retired in 1982 as the Board's SIgnalling and Safety Officer, long before Clapham. After the Health & Safety Executive absorbed the RI in 1990 it completely revised the legal framework for railway safety. The provisions of the 1871 Act for public inquiries (both by individual inspectors and by courts of inquiry) were repealed in 1997: the last 1871 Act inquiry was into the Ais Gill collision of 1995.

     

    All the inquiries held under the 1871 Act were theoretically public, even those into minor personnel accidents. In such cases the public had little chance of finding out that the inquiry was taking place, and the resulting reports were (after WW2) no longer published by HMSO, but only circulated within BR.

     

    In 1871 Act inquiries, whether or not there were any lawyers present rather depended on the seriousness of the event. The Unions would often provide legally qualified representation for their members in fatal cases. The expectation, though, was that issues of blame would be gone into at the Coroner's inquest. It was usually following an inquest that prosecution of railwaymen took place.

     

    The creation of RAIB made it possible for the safety investigation to be completely separated from the inquiries of the regulator and the police. The inquest process remains as a controversial legacy of the old way of doing things.

     

    Stuart J

    RAIB (retired)

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  7. 5 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

    Any prosecutions are pursued by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) and HSE.  The RAIB may be called upon as witnesses to provide expert evidence during any trial which may result.

    Absolutely not. The RAIB does not become involved in criminal prosecutions in any way. If expert evidence is required it must come from other sources.

     

    Stuart J

    RAIB (retired)

    • Agree 1
  8. On 19/07/2022 at 11:33, jools1959 said:

    I want to build a small diorama of Ketton signal box in 4mm, and though it’s all MAS signalling, there’s a single MR lower quadrant signal being used.  I’m thinking of using a GWR lower quadrant as they do seem to look very similar (in my eyes).  If not the GWR signal, anyone else suggest something suitable?

    It really depends how fussy you are. I would say that a GWR signal is as like a Midland signal as a Hall is like a Black 5- they do the same thing with the  same basic components, but they are recognisably different shapes 😮

    • Like 5
  9. Well-written books about railway preservation are not common. I don't know of any about the Bluebell, but then I'm not a Bluebell person.

     

    Those I can recommend are all rather old. The Little Wonder by John Winton (1986), is about the Festiniog and the Deviation. One Man's Railway  by John Snell (1983) tells the story of the RH&DR up to the point where he became involved with it in the 1970s. Brian Hollingsworth wrote Great Western Adventure (1981), which covers the organisations which aimed to preserve the GWR. All three include the sort of material you are after.

     

    There must have been other books published since then, but they have passed me by!

    • Informative/Useful 2
  10. 21 hours ago, Dunsignalling said:

    No photo attached (copyright) but a pal has acquired a print of Birkenhead Park H signal box with a BR green Merseyside EMU passing it.

     

    He's curious to know the significance of the "H" suffix, as now am I (the area is well outside my sphere of knowledge).

     

    Can anybody help?

     

    John   

    The Mersey Railway lettered all their signal boxes, starting at A (Liverpool Central East, see https://janfordsworld.blogspot.com/2014/02/railways-around-birkenhead.html ). When the new box at Birkenhead Park was opened in 1938 it retained its designation as cabin H under the Mersey scheme.

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  11. 10 hours ago, stevel said:

    Hi Khris

     

     

    this is probably your best bet,

    note the station and signalbox are still there as a vsitor centre.

    Ian Pope, Bob How and Paul Karau, An Illustrated History of the Severn and Wye Railway: volume one, Wild Swan Publications, Upper Bucklebury, 1983, ISBN 0 906 867 17 7

     

    Stephen

     

    Erm... Tintern isn't on the Severn and Wye. The book you cite covers the stations at Lydney (Junction and Town), Whitecroft and Parkend.

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